Chinese New Year Travel Picks Up Again

This weekend, new year celebrations are kicking off in China. The country where Covid-19 started and, arguably, ended is in the unfortunate position to have had the pandemic overshadow its biggest festival for four years in a row. In 2023, it is expected that 2.1 billion trips will be taken for the festivities - still almost a third fewer than in 2019. As coronavirus restrictions just ended in the country, the official travel forecast suggests that the virus is still putting a damper on holiday travel.

In 2020, Chinese New Year commenced on January 25, right at the beginning of the initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. The Chinese Ministry of Transport had predicted a normal level of travel for the holiday period some weeks prior, but last-minute warnings and cancellations suggest it didn't happen that way. An estimate of travel for the year therefore doesn't exist. In 2021 and 2022, the Chinese government estimated that there were around 66 percent fewer trips taken than in 2019.

Data from travel platform Ctrip shows that some Chinese were quick to book an overseas trip for the week-long holidays when travel restrictions in China fell on December 26. Demand for flights to nearby Hong Kong as well as to Southeast Asia soared especially quickly. Yet, the numbers are still a far cry from the pre-pandemic travel activity surrounding Chinese New Year, sometimes dubbed the world's biggest human migration.